Last year I spent a lot of time and money on my genealogical research. Now I’ve reached the point where I think many people doing genealogy find themselves--recording it, reading through what’s been collected, and filing it away. All of this is to process your research findings.
At times, this is something I’m very good at. I’ve taught myself that when I’m out researching to write down the full titles and authors of books, microfilm, or whatever I’m looking at so that I can keep track of what I’ve looked at or not.
During 2011 I really got into ordering microfilm at my local Family History Center and now I’m seeing the value of taking more of a hunting and gathering approach to genealogical research. Tracking down or hunting for records is definitely the most rewarding task for me, but it’s very important to process the documents that you find when you’re out in the world looking at and making photocopies of these documents. Many times, I’ve found myself so eager to read these documents that I put off processing them properly.
Recording your research findings is crucial in performing genealogical research. Typically, this involves recording a document or record in your research log, putting the information gleaned into your genealogy program, citing your findings both on the document itself and in your genealogy program, and then filing the document away in the proper file folder.
For me, the system of fully processing a document has come to include transcribing it. It’s my belief that it’s very important to completely read through the documents that you’ve found. Sometimes this may involve making a transcription of the record so that you can fully comprehend what the document is saying and its purpose many years ago.
It may seem pointless to transcribe records handwritten documents, but I’ve found this to be especially helpful to me in processing a record that I discovered. Sometimes I find the handwriting on old documents to be difficult to read, so I’ve taken to transcribing them as a way to make them easier for me to read. At times, the information in the documents is pretty every day, mundane stuff; however, it does provide a window into the ancestor’s world. This helps to flesh out the personality of the person, their life, and their environment. Learning certain things about an ancestor and the area in which they lived could open up new and previously unknown avenues of research that would’ve remained hidden if these so called mundane events hadn’t been transcribed.
